Iron Man: It's A Wonderful Life

Chapter Six

December 24, -:-

She wore jeans. A knit sweater the color people called eggplant, with a pocket across her belly and a hood in the back. Her hair, threaded with gray, was gathered back into an unkempt braid, pulled over one shoulder. An unshaped eyebrow gave Tony a cautiously challenging look.

"Is there a problem?"

Tony waited for the punchline; for the woman to move further into the light so that he could see that she didn't really look like Sunset, but just enough to fool him in the slanted shadows and jaundiced light of the 2000 Toyota Corolla. Howard's hand came down on his shoulder, and Tony's heart nearly stopped. His father. Right. His father must have an explanation. Tony turned to him, mouth gaping, but never got the chance to speak.

"Forgive my son his rudeness, he's had a nasty shock. It's not every day you find yourself with a couple of knives in your face."

Sunset grinned, but snorted, and Tony twitched again. It was the most inelegant sound he'd ever heard her make. "I guess that means you two've never been to prison. That's good." Casting a quick glance at Tony, who was still staring at her as though she were a biological specimen in a chemical filled jar, Sunset addressed herself to Howard. "Were they hitchhikers you picked up? Kinda ironic, don't you think? You two mostly seem alright," The 'mostly' was said with an eye shift toward Tony. "I don't tend to worry too much. I've learned a few things about taking care of myself, so-"

"Jail?" Tony finally found his voice, and the shock was apparent in his voice. "You were in prison? That… you're joking."

If Tony had been a dog who'd begun to speak, he could not have surprised Sunset more with his sudden earnest involvement in their conversation. Maybe it was his almost flattering disbelief that made her answer the impertinent question, but she did, with a hint of the smirk he knew so well, making his heart pulse.

"Five years, for corporate fraud." Even facing the road and Tony still reeling from having stepped into the Twilight Zone, he could see the guarded look in her eyes above the nonchalance she wore like a badge of pride. "Tried to steal what they call 'intellectual property' from my ex so I could start my own business. Turns out, you can sue over ideas just as easily as actual property, so - Guilty."

Her eyes moved to Howard's in the rearview mirror, but they were on Tony, who seemed to be fighting bewilderment and satisfaction at Sunset's comeuppance. "Huh." He could say nothing more than that. Tony had protected her, even after knowing she'd been the one to steal his father's property. Howard had figured out what must have happened, but Tony had never given him enough to use against her. She had manipulated him, used him, broken his heart, and worse; but he had not been able to act in vengeance, even if it was what she deserved. Who knew how many people she'd done the same to since then?

"- I'm a personal assistant now," she was saying. "It's hard to get back into it, after… but I learned some good skills while I was in there, and I work for the senator, so I think it makes him look good, having an ex-con on his staff."

Tony took in the colorful Upstate accent that gave a nasal quality to her now absent finishing school tones. He frowned, and nearly commented on her working for Senator Stern, when they came through the tunnel and the skyline of Manhattan came into view.

"Holy shit!"

The car swerved, and Sunset repeated his epithet under her breath. "What the fuck is wrong with you, are you insane?"

"What the fuck happened?"

"To what?"

"To what?" He pointed to the windshield, looking at her as though she'd begun speaking in tongues. "To the city!"

Buildings, or what had once laid claim to that term, jutted into the sky like broken teeth after a boxing match. Black char crawled across the landscape like decay, leaving the unsettling impression that it would continue to spread if left unwatched. Among some of the ruins, or in those buildings miraculously left whole, windows covered in black paper hinted at inhabitants beyond, and their wariness of illuminating the night sky. Though the sun had not yet set, Manhattan's usual sea of lights - thousands of them - were missing.

The trickle of vehicles on the road provided the only source, their head and tail lights, though guarded with makeshift hoods, kept the roads safe, for now. Otherwise, the city was not only dark, compared to the Manhattan Tony knew, it was silent.

Sunset brought the car to a stop to turn her full attention to Tony, sure it was a sick joke until she saw the horror on his face. She asked Howard. "Shit, where have you two been?"

"Just… tell me," Tony rasped. He couldn't look away from the graveyard of his hometown.

For a long time, there was no answer, and Tony could feel her staring. Frustration knotted his muscles, drawing bile into his stomach, and he might have exploded had Sunset not finally answered. "It was the attack. Six months ago, there was a drone strike. We've been at war with Afghanistan ever since."

Tony made her pull over so that he could retch bile, from the empty stomach of a man that did not exist, onto the side of the road.

Not many people went near Ground Zero unless they had to. Tony begged Sunset to take them as close as she was willing. What she was willing to do was get these increasingly strange men out of her car, whether, she said, that meant to a hospital, to the bomb site, or on the side of the road. They were just lucky she'd found Jesus, because most people-

She was cut off by Tony's bleak, but amused, laughter.

Sunset likely would have dumped them had it not been for Howard, who turned on charm his son had thought mythic, until at last they watched her taillights recede in the direction of Brooklyn.

Tony stood upon the precipice of what had once been midtown Manhattan. Currently, it could have been the set of every post-apocalyptic movie he had ever seen. Once proud buildings that had made up his everyday life were simply gone, and for blocks around, in all directions, circumstances were the same.

"This isn't on me." No streets existed in any familiar sense. They had buckled, broken, and been flung away to form standing stone monuments with angry, incomplete, ruins on them. What remained was buried beneath fallen debris, and paths that had been cleared away revealed nothing that resembled what had been lost there.

The large chain link fence, topped with boards and chicken wire, stood out like a giant silver sore thumb amid this wasteland - obviously where the drone had struck.

He needed to see it. To prove that this couldn't have anything to do with him. Sunset was one thing, he could buy that, but this?

Howard followed without offering guidance. "Stark Industries is the leading weapons manufacturer in the world – not just in quantity, but in quality."

Tony climbed the fence, but stopped short of actually going over the chicken wire. "No. Gimme your coat." He did not cause this. His existence did not stand between this, and the lives of who knew how many thousands.

"You know Stane was dealing with terrorists, only you weren't here to-"

"No."

"To shut down production-"

"Dammit-"

"And more importantly, to stop him."

"Stop!"

Using his father's jacket (like hell he'd use his own) Tony mounted and dropped to the other side of the fence and found himself standing at the edge of a gaping maw that had opened in the earth, casting shadows of hellfire to mark the drone's passage on what buildings surrounding it had not tumbled entirely to their knees in the face of so mighty an offence. Billboards, faces burned and peeling, bowed their heads from view in mournful defeat.

There were signs of recovery and cleanup. Construction equipment loomed like sleeping leviathans along cleared portions of what he could only assume was the surrounding road, though the lack of emergency vehicles told Tony that any search and rescue attempts had ceased, and all hopes for finding survivors were now lost.

Tony scoured land and sky for something to tie himself to this location, some landmark by which he could make sense of the pointless destruction around him. His feet struck something that was not another hunk of twisted detritus on the ground, and Tony bent to wrest the object free from the wreckage. It was large, and would have been large on its own, only it had been fused to two of its brethren by an intense heat. The 'P' that had drawn Tony's attention was as long as his arm; equally as long as the 'A', and the 'L'.

He did not realize what he held in his hands right away. His fingers traced the hollow shapes, and then it hit him, and Tony looked up and saw… nothing. No Palace Theater. No Doubletree, no Westin, no Times Square Building, no Roxy Delicatessen, no TKTS, not even an Olive Garden, or the M&Ms Store. All gone. In fact, he thought he recognized a Sheraton up on 59th, and maybe some boutiques on 37th.

Staring into the crevice, he asked dully, knowing his father would be there, "S.I. weapons did this?"

"Stane Industries, technically, but my designs, yes." Howard moved beside him and contemplated the damage his legacy had wrought. If he felt the same guilt over it that Tony did, it did not show. "The conflict began, much as it did in your world, only they had greater firepower."

It was a tired refrain, but Tony said it anyway. "You can get weapons anywhere."

"Yes, you can. But with Stane supplying them so readily, they're making their own money, hand over fist, brokering to other terrorists. Stane doesn't care where the money comes from, so long as they paid him. He saturated the market with a superior product, and no one found out, let alone stopped him."

This – this, was something Tony had not yet considered, and it stopped him cold. "But," he licked his lips, processing quickly. "Anyone could be supplying them. There are plenty of arms brokers."

"None that have Stark weapons." Howard smirked smugly. "It does make a difference. There's a reason Sunset came to you with her ideas, in the hopes that you'd restart weapons production."

"If you want the best, you get the best." Tony grew morose. "And you stop at nothing to get it." Sunset's maxim. He stared into the abyss, wondering if it were possible for this dark tragedy to follow him into his own world should he even think of returning.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Bomb," Howard answered grimly. "Dropped from overhead; hence the blackout. There's a curfew in place, but we've still some time. Come. There's plenty more you should see."

Tony lingered, searing the vision of what might have been, and what could be, into his memory. He never wanted to forget the potential repercussions of his errant decisions.

Following his father, they stepped carefully over the remains of the city and followed no discernable path until they finally reached a part of town that did, at last, bear resemblance to the New York of Tony's remembrance. It still bore the scars of recent injury: black flares of ashy shadows licked up the sides of buildings, some of which seemed to lean on their foundations. There were countless boarded up windows, and a few buildings, faced primarily with glass, appeared to have been denuded and re-clothed in robes of brown paper.

The pavement rippled beneath them, but they were more or less sidewalks, and Howard led Tony down them in the direction of the Financial District.

Only a few people walked the streets in the gloaming, and they moved with purpose, eager to attain their own doorsteps before the darkness enforced by the city fell upon them. Car slouched past at a pace laughably sedate for Manhattan traffic, head and tail lights still blazing beneath modified blinders intended to shield the light from aerial view. The entire procession was completely silent, and within minutes of them passing up current, Tony found them unsettling.

"This seems like an overreaction, doesn't it? Americans tend to have a John McClane reaction to these kinds of crises. This historical reenactment thing is more than a little creepy."

Howard didn't respond. Tony examined his grim expression and what he saw filled him with dread.

"This isn't an isolated incident, is it?" He stopped on the street, forcing his father to stop with him. "This has happened before."

Howard shook his head. "When New York was attacked, so were D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, and Boston. They were well-coordinated strikes using drone technology replicated, or so the media says, from one of our own they downed last year. What the government knows, but the public doesn't, is that they were bombing the U.S. with stolen American materials, although the government has been unsuccessful in tracking down the source of the contraband parts."

Tony knew what was coming next, but refused to look at his father, to have that point driven home for him yet again. It was too much for him to take.

"What the government doesn't realize, is that the snake their looking for has been right in their midst all along."

There was something gently insinuating in Howard's voice, and it rankled on Tony's nerves, because he got it. "Stane not only encouraged the war, he facilitated the bombings. He's responsible for the deaths of thousands." Maybe more. Many more than Tony carried on his conscience, but Tony was willing to bet that Obie slept soundly in his bed every night. Just as he had when he'd arranged Tony's kidnapping and murder by terrorists - and the man had practically been his uncle.

"From a purely strategic standpoint, it makes sense. You're a supplier of weapons, you need to create demand to facilitate your ability to supply. He's broadening his customer base. I'm sure on paper, this is all putting him in the plus column."

Howard agreed. "Obie is a chess player. In this game, he'll protect his king no matter who he has to sacrifice, and he'll always have a strategy."

"And he'll always be at least five moves ahead," Tony murmured. Obie had taught him chess, and they'd spent many hours together over a board. Obie's entire life model was based on the game. That meant Obie would probably get away with this. He'd have everything planned out and be prepared for every possible move with countermoves of his own. It would be next to impossible to make anything stick to him.

"Dammit." In his mind, he could see himself sitting on the couch with Obie just behind him, whispering in his ear. He was getting away again.

"This way." Tony was yanked from his memory by his father's voice, calling him toward the open doors of a church. A military truck stood out in front, a sign on it bearing the insignias of the four branches of the armed services and the words 'Induction Center'.

They were still close enough to the blast site that the effects of the impact were observable. The building's foundation had kicked up on one end, as if some giant had stepped on the opposing corner. A tree had fallen into the ancient cemetery surrounding the church, and the tombstones, bearing turn-of-the-century dates and sinking deep in their beds, were littered liberally with the debris from its taller, more vulnerable neighbors.

Though this was not a church Tony had ever found himself in at any point before now, it would have been impossible for him not to note the even greater changes that had occurred inside. As high as the arm could reach, every wall in the narthex had been covered in a palimpsest of notices, begging the locations of missing loved ones, lost pets, or honoring the dead.

No wall displayed less than one of the nation's flags and an array of posters boasting patriotic slogans, all so prominent that that they obscured and replaced any religious iconography with the overt suggestion of a new faith - that of the American Way.

This supposition was reinforced by the men and women gathered within, the largest number of people Tony had seen since waking up on the side of the road after the accident. If not actively kneeling at the altar in somber prayer, coincidentally beneath one of the flags, the worshippers paced the long lines of notices with the intense focus of one attempting to memorize their catechism.

This was a new world for them, and the dead, their saints. They had been drafted into the equivalent of a holy war, whether they saw it or not, and every one of them wore upon their breast a small golden flag pin, which caught the light of the churches ancient chandeliers just as a crucifix might.

The sound was down, but a familiar voice drew Tony's attention from a television in the corner where some of the inductees had gathered before their examination. The crawling of his skin told him all he needed to know, even before he saw Obadiah Stane on the screen.

"...a great sacrifice for your nation. There is no man or woman more heroic than one who is willing to put aside all that he or she holds dear for the sake of his fellow man, and we, the American People, thank-"

Tony gripped the back of the chair in front of him. He felt nauseated, and had he not been so angry, he would have thrown up at the words captioning Stane's face across the bottom of the screen.

Senator Obadiah Stane.

Senator.

Maybe he was going to throw up. Tony straightened. "Sunset. She works for Stane. Is she…" he looked at the television. "Is she a part of this?" He wouldn't put it past her. Those two together… Tony remembered the letters of the Palace Theater sign and shuddered.

"For her troubles, if they're ever caught, she'll go down for it alone. Stane's made sure she never has any power."

Tony was almost tempted to feel sorry for her.

"Gentlemen," an army sergeant prowling the field for newcomers called from behind them. Upon seeing them more closely, he gave Tony a critical once-over. "You're late, son." He eyed their unadorned lapels as if verifying membership among the elite. "We could have used you last year."

He meant fit men in their prime. Or women. Not the children or elderly they'd been scraping the bottom of the barrel to bring him these days. Tony felt heat rise within him, not for his own sake, but for those dying, about to die, and being callously recruited to die, by men who treated it like an inconvenience.

Howard put a hand on Tony's arm and said, "He's an inventor; he's been working for Senator Stane for the war effort. We both have. You want to question his orders, you can take it up with the Senator." He paused. "You have a problem with that?"

There were any number of colorful responses Tony would have accepted from a New Yorker spoken to that way, even one wearing military fatigues. What he didn't expect was the posture-straightening respect and glint of hero-worship in the man's eye, for a man who'd never even served in Vietnam.

"No, sir. Sorry, sir." The sergeant practically snapped to attention and buried his nose in his clipboard. "Names?"

"Potts." Tony was surprised at how easily the lie had risen to his lips, as though there were no other name for him to consider. A first name, while not quite necessary, occurred to him a moment or so later. "Harold." Happy's birth name.

His father gave him a look of subtle amusement, but gave the name Howard Potts, either for reasons of familial solidarity, or in mockery. Tony was leaning toward the latter.

"Why exactly are we here?" Tony asked in frustration. His father hadn't told him anything. "That can't be it – the war? Sunset? I care about New York, but-"

"I thought you'd like to see a friend. See how he would have turned out without your influence."

It did not take a man of Tony's intellect to guess of whom Howard was speaking. There was only one military officer Tony had any close ties with, and earlier that evening, Tony had told him to fuck off.

"Where is he?" Tony asked quietly, almost hesitantly. "How do we see him?" He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to, after Sunset. After Manhattan. Rhodey would be right in the middle of all this. Tony had fought with him just that afternoon, and now he wanted nothing more that to take everything he'd said back. "What happened to him?"

Howard silence indicated that he seemed to be considering his answer carefully, though his response, when it came, appeared simple enough to Tony. "Colonel Rhodes is commander of the 18th training wing at Sampson Air Force Base on Lake Senaca – recently reopened because of the war."

It seemed better than he'd thought, and Tony took the information much like one would take the news that an old lover had recently married, both pleased, and remorseful. "So he's doing well for himself? That's good. Better than when I-"

"Potts! Harold! Howard! This way, please!" The smart mouthed sergeant from before ushered them through a pair of double doors bearing stained glass angels in mirrored profile. A hallway of what Tony supposed were classrooms or offices stretched before them, with soldiers and civilian men and women transiting between them like industrious ants, hard at labor.

"Potts, Harold – you're in Exam Room one – Potts, Howard – you're in Two. After that, you'll take your reports to Interview Rooms One and Two on the opposite side of the corridor, it's real simple. Once you're done in there, go into the next room down the line – Potts, Howard, when you're done in Four, go back to One to finish off. Got it?"

Tony nodded, but stole a look at his father. Were they really going through with this? Howard ignored him, so Tony reluctantly followed the sergeant's orders, facing his physical behind the door of Exam Room One with grim faced forbearance.

Fortunately, it was quick. The mass hysteria the attacks seemed to have engendered, and the desperation of the draft, had lowered the standards for fitness requirements, Tony found. He had all his limbs, no respiration or (laughably) heart problems, no other serious medical conditions, and – as determined by a ridiculous exam, administered by a woefully unqualified M.D. – was mentally sound.

Crossing the hall to the appropriate Interview Room, Tony noted the insignia of the U.S. Air Force affixed to the door and logically assumed that he'd be meeting with representatives from each branch of the armed forces for recruitment.

He had opened the door before realizing who would be on the other side of it, and cursed his lack of foresight, and the loss of time to prepare. His feet nearly turned him back out of the door, but Tony stood there, in the designer suit he'd been wearing since the board meeting that morning, which felt like a lifetime ago, and waited for his best friend to notice him.